Both Bengals are grappling with intense periods of unrest. While the political events unfolding in these two lands may not align directly, they share one significant commonality: distrust.

“Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.” — Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 3.

The history of Bangladesh’s leftist politics is a story of unity and division, of shared ideals splintering into competing paths.

While Europe experienced an age of evangelical awakening in the eighteenth century, political circumstances in India posed challenges to the work of missionary preaching.

The 1947 Partition of South Asia is usually associated with divisions, disruption, and the melancholia of displacement.

Reading The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi in the midst of Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation of Gaza is both illuminating and depressing.

In conversation with Salimullah Khan, one of Bangladesh’s most prominent public intellectuals and a professor in the Department of History & Philosophy at North South University.

While the July Uprising was sparked by economic problems, political repression, and a desire for democracy, it found a strong and surprising voice in a new form of music for Bangladesh: rap. Two songs, “Kotha Ko” (Speak Up) and “Awaz Utha” (Raise Your Voice), came to represent the sentiment of the movement in July.

In his analysis of the Estado da Índia, which was the official name of the Portuguese Empire, George Winius distinguished between the formal administration by the Estado’s headquarters at Goa over overseas possessions and the ‘informal empire’, which he called the ‘shadow empire’, that the Portuguese established in the Bay of Bengal. The shadow empire was a unique experiment carried out by sailors, merchant adventurers, pirates, and missionaries, with little formal sanction either from Goa or from Portugal.

I did not personally know Tajuddin Ahmad, but he was a contemporary of ours, and the politics he practised was within the Awami League—though there were different strands within the party.

I first met Tajuddin Ahmad—or Tajuddin Bhai, as I knew him—in the 1960s, during the pre-Liberation period. After I joined the Awami League, Bangabandhu told me to meet Tajuddin Ahmad, as he would answer all my questions on politics and the party, and that he possessed deep knowledge of both politics and people.

The Daily Star (TDS): How do you view Tajuddin Ahmad’s early political journey and his emergence as a key national figure?

Every moment of the night of 25 March 1971 and the following two months will always shine brightly in the depths of my memory. Even though I might not be able to express all those living memories in words, I will try to articulate a possible description of the events.

As a person, Tajuddin Ahmad was an idealist. In his personal life and professional conduct, he was disciplined and guided by a deep sense of restraint and propriety.

No leader emerges in a vacuum. The making of a political figure is deeply influenced by the social structures around them—family, religion, education, and the broader environment all leave lasting imprints.

The historic journey of the people of Eastern Bengal in the middle half of the last century, to be more precise from 1947 to 1971, was an amazing story with great impact on the post-colonial social and political development of the subcontinent.

In the fraught political environment of Bangladesh, where the image of politicians and the idea of politics have remained systematically devalued and perverted, Tajuddin Ahmad (TA) dared to be different and charted his journey according to his own intellectual and moral imperatives.

The Daily Star (TDS): We all know Tajuddin Ahmad as a leader, but how was he as a father?

The Daily Star (TDS): What inspired you to make the documentary Tajuddin Ahmad: An Unsung Hero?

Tajuddin Ahmad was tragically killed in jail on 3 November 1975. His life was cut short at the age of 50. Yet, in this brief life, he had the rare opportunity to perform great service to his country — and he made full use of it.